This is a sad day for Sun. It sought to re-invent its business through open source; and the experiment has failed, culminating not in a re-invigorated company, but instead acquisition by an old-school proprietary software company, Oracle.<\/p>\n
It is possible to build a successful business around open source software. Zend<\/a> is doing it with PHP; Red Hat<\/a> has done it with Linux. These are smaller companies though, and they have not tried to migrate an older business built on a proprietary model. A further complication is that Sun is a hardware business, and although open source is an important part of its hardware strategy as well as its software strategy, it is a different kind of business.<\/p>\n Maybe the strategy was good, but it was the recession, or the server market, that killed Sun. In the end it does not make any difference, the outcome is what counts.<\/p>\n Reading the official overview<\/a> of the deal, I see lots of references to \u201copen\u201d and \u201cstandard-based\u201d, which means nothing, but no mention of open source.<\/p>\n The point of interest now is what happens to Sun\u2019s most prominent open source projects: OpenOffice.org, MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris<\/a>. Developers will be interested to see what happens to NetBeans, the open source Java IDE, following the Oracle acquisition, and how it will relate to Oracle\u2019s JDeveloper IDE. These open source projects have a momentum of their own and are protected by their licenses, but a significant factor is what proportion of the committers – those who actually write the software and commit their changes to the repository \u2013 are Sun employees. Although it is not possible to take back open source code, it is possible to reduce investment, or to start creating premium editions available only to commercial subscribers, which already appeared to be part of MySQL\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n I presume that both OpenOffice and Java will feature in Oracle\u2019s stated intention<\/a> to build an end-to-end integrated solution:<\/p>\n Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system \u2013 applications to disk \u2013 where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n says CEO Larry Ellison, who also says nothing about open source. This will involve invading Microsoft\u2019s turf \u2013 something Sun was always willing to do, but not particularly successful at executing.<\/p>\n The best outcome for the open source community will be if Oracle continues to support Sun\u2019s open source projects along the same lines as before. Even if that happens, the industry has lost a giant of the open source world.<\/p>\n Some good comments from Redmonk\u2019s Michael Cot\u00e9 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is a sad day for Sun. It sought to re-invent its business through open source; and the experiment has failed, culminating not in a re-invigorated company, but instead acquisition by an old-school proprietary software company, Oracle. It is possible to build a successful business around open source software. Zend is doing it with PHP; … Continue reading The end of Sun\u2019s bold open source experiment<\/span> \n